“The Vocative” is an ongoing project interpreting the current and evolving state of New York City's Chinatown in the Lower East Side. My photographs puzzle over the idea of gentrification as a compressive and catalytic force on the residents, businesses, and landscape of Chinatown.

While this series functions as a type of ode and elegy to the living community, I envision the completed project to follow the poetic and antithetical logic of the duilian, the Chinese couplet, by presenting a sequence of diptychs.

Through the diptych's collapsing of time and space, I find a strange and contemporary sense of emotional realism.